by Nicci French
27
Her eyes were closed, and her skin was a shade of light grey, blue round her puffy lips. She was thinner than I remembered, and the white sheet that was drawn up over her seemed hardly disturbed by her body. I stared until my eyes pricked and noticed things about her that I’d never seen before. The split ends in her mane of hair, the faintest down on her upper lip, the tiny mole just beneath her left ear, the grazes running in parallel lines along the soft skin of her inner arms. She looked like a wax model in which everything was uncannily correct and yet lacked the animating spirit to bring the form to life. I’d never seen Holly still before. In all the years I’d known her, I’d never seen her asleep or simply restful. Her face changed like a flame flickering in a wind, she threw her hands around dramatically when she talked, tossed back her hair impatiently, leaned forward in her chair, leaned back, tapped pencils against the table, bit the end of her thumb. She was forever jumping up, pacing around, changing position as if she couldn’t find a place where she felt comfortable and at home.
Well, she was at rest now. Absolutely still and no trouble to anyone: not to Charlie, not to me, not to the nurses at the front desk who’d shown me to this bed and drawn the curtains carefully to give me privacy. Beyond them, there were all the smells and sounds of a hospital ward, but by her bed there was a hush. I’d come straight from the office, as soon as I received the phone call, leaving everything in the chaos Holly had caused in her final weeks at work. We’d all been trying to undo some of her actions. Sometimes we even had difficulty establishing what she had done, let alone why. But it seemed that no sooner had we placated an angry client than a boxload of madly expensive silk stockings from Italy – presumably one for each woman in the office – or the following day, ten new office chairs, specially and expensively designed to prevent back trouble, had been delivered. I went through recent expenses and settled most of the outstanding invoices. I had a long, complicated meeting with the bank manager, then had to deal with the architect who arrived one morning with his two assistants and beautiful plans for how we could transform the space we worked in, installing glass beams and knocking a shaft through to the floor above us. Apparently Holly had insisted that the company based there, a team of grey-suited, hawk-eyed solicitors, would agree.
I didn’t understand how she’d had the time, the hours in her day, to wreak such havoc. Now she lay in front of me so very quietly. I leaned forward and picked up a hand that was lying on the sheet, blue-veined and cold. If she died now, slipped from this deathful sleep, the havoc would die with her. All the restlessness and rage and pain and sheer blinding exhaustion of being her and of knowing her would disappear. A thought was hovering in the margins of my mind, and I made an effort and brought it to the front and looked at it straight on. A part of me wanted her to die and to have done with it and leave us all in peace at last. That was what Holly must have thought as well, when she crammed all those pills into her mouth: that we all wanted her to die, that we’d only be relieved.
I ran my thumb over the bumpy blue veins on the back of her hand. She smelt of disinfectant and vomit. Her lips were slightly open and I saw that her tongue was white. When her eyes opened it was only for a moment. They stared blankly at me, then closed again. When I had first met Holly, and she had come bounding into the office in her preposterous boots, I knew I wanted to be her friend. She was so beguiling, and had this way of really listening to what I said, really looking at me; attending to me, I suppose. It made me feel almost uncomfortable sometimes. In fact, becoming her friend was a bit like embarking on an affair. She bought me presents on the spur of the moment, would ring me up in the middle of the night when she’d had an idea, get angry all of a sudden because of something I’d said or hadn’t said. She once told me she loved me, sitting at a table in the South of France eating seafood and drinking wine and looking out over the sea that glinted miraculously in the afternoon sun. I remember I blushed and stuttered something and felt a bit drunk and absurdly English, but she didn’t mind. She just giggled and put her hand over mine and said she knew I loved her too; I didn’t need to say it; we’d always be friends. She was an impossible adventure.
‘Meg?’
‘Holly? I’m here.’
‘Going to be sick.’
I yanked open the curtains and shouted for a nurse, then watched helplessly as Holly leaned over a plastic bowl and shouted up small dribbles of colourless vomit streaked with blood, then retched air and groans. The nurse seemed unconcerned. When Holly had finished and sunk back against her pillow, she wiped her forehead with a piece of tissue and clicked away with the bowl.
‘I could be in prison,’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘It’s not a crime any more.’
‘What?’
‘You know, trying to…’ I hardly liked to say the words‘… kill yourself.’
Slowly she shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. It was almost a groan. I had to lean close to her mouth to make out the words. She gulped painfully between every phrase. ‘You heard? I did another bad thing. Pushed that awful sculpture thing out of the window. Almost landed on an old guy in the street. He dialled 999.’ I almost thought I could see a flicker of amusement in her tired eyes. ‘I almost kill him and he saves my life.’
She sank back down into the bed. Her eyes closed. I sat silently, holding her hand.
‘Then Charlie arrived as well. Poor Charlie. Probably thinks it serves me right,’ said Holly, in a whisper.
I tried to make a joke of it. ‘It does. You’ve been a bloody idiot.’
But Holly said, eyes still closed, ‘I’m sorry, Meg. Sorry about everything.’
‘You don’t need to…’
‘Yes, I do. I’m sorry. So sorry. I’ve wrecked everything. Everything. Don’t deserve to be alive. Feel so sick now.’
‘Shall I call the nurse again?’
‘Nothing left to come out, just bits of my guts. What a mess.’
‘Charlie’s downstairs. He went to get some fresh air. Do you want me to get him?’
‘No. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’ Tears oozed from under her lashes.
I waited, watching her puffy grey face, her blue-veined hands fluttering on the hospital sheet. I swallowed hard, breathing in her stale, sickly smell and wanting suddenly to be outside in the cold, clean weather. ‘I love you,’ I said at last, in a gruff mutter.
‘Tried to call you.’
‘What?’
‘When I was dying. Tried to phone you.’
A shudder passed through me, like a cold ripple of knowledge. I’d never be free of her now. ‘You tried to phone me?’
She gave the most tired smile as she spoke, each word an obvious effort. ‘Line didn’t work. Couldn’t get a tone. You know, me and technology, the old story. I tried to leave you a note. Don’t tell Charlie. It should have been to him. I don’t want to cause unnecessary offence. Or even necessary offence.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Not much. Sorry, mainly. The police didn’t find it, and Charlie didn’t see it. Maybe it was in my dream that I wrote it, the kind of waking dream I had when I was dying. I knew you’d think it was your fault that I did it, but it wasn’t. I do understand about you and Charlie.’
‘Sorry? Me and Charlie?’
‘Mmm.’
‘God, Holly. You mean you really thought that we… that I could ever…’ I stopped. I picked up one of her cold hands and held it between my own, rubbing warmth back into it.
‘It was me,’ she said drearily. ‘I wrecked everything.’
I grinned down at her, feeling absurdly fond of her. ‘You know what? I’ve got to go in a minute. Because there’s someone waiting outside for me right now. He brought me here. His name is Todd, you remember him? I didn’t tell you because it was our secret and we didn’t want to tell anyone for a bit.’
Holly’s eyes opened. She gazed at me through tears that were welling. ‘You’re really not… ?’ she said.
‘No.�
�
‘You mean, you never… ?’
‘You’re my best friend. I wouldn’t do that.’
‘I was sure,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d lost you both, through my own stupid fault.’
‘You have been pretty difficult, one way and another.’
‘Todd?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lucky Todd.’
Her voice was slurred. I put her hand back on the cover and stroked it. ‘Get some sleep now.’
‘Meg?’
‘What?’
‘I’m happy now.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I’m really, really happy…’
Her lips parted a fraction and her breathing deepened. Her eyes pulsed behind her lids. She was dreaming.
Charlie came along the corridor holding a bunch of meagre yellow carnations that he must have bought from the hospital shop downstairs. Although he had obviously shaved that morning and brushed his often unkempt hair, his gait was shambolic, as if he were punch-drunk, and his eyes were on the floor; he was frowning, in his own world.
‘Charlie,’ I said.
He stopped and stared at me, yet I had the feeling that he was looking straight through me at something else.
‘I’ve just left her. She’s asleep again.’
In his way he seemed as tired, as ashen, as Holly in her hospital bed.
‘She’s been like that,’ he said. ‘She wakes, she seems barely alive, then she talks until she gets tired and slips back into deep sleep again.’
‘She feels guilty,’ I said.
‘She feels lots of things.’
I felt awkward. I didn’t want to compete with him about who best knew what Holly was thinking. ‘She’s going to be all right, Charlie.’
‘Maybe,’ he said dully. ‘For the time being, maybe.’
‘You couldn’t have done anything more than you did.’
‘Oh, Meg,’ he said, meeting my eyes for the first time. ‘Of course I could. I left her alone. I should have known.’
‘You can’t be with her twenty-four hours of the day.’
He didn’t say anything, just shrugged and put his face into the carnations. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said.
‘I’m coming in again this evening after work.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And you should get some sleep or you’ll be ill as well, and that’s no use to anyone.’
‘Yes,’ he said, not meaning it.
∗
I returned at seven o’clock that evening but there were too many people wanting to see her: Charlie, in a clean denim shirt; my cousin Luke; Naomi, wearing too much blue eye-shadow; and finally I saw, to my horror, Holly’s mother. She sat bolt upright beside the bed, a pinched expression of probity under the gun-metal hair, holding her daughter’s hand as if it were an unpleasant object someone had asked her to take care of for a few minutes. Holly lay among them like a corpse, a plastic jug of heavy-scented lilies by her side. Was I the only one who could tell she was only pretending to be asleep?
The next day I was there when Dr Thorne arrived. He was a tall, spindly man with a thin neck and shrewd grey eyes; he looked a bit like a stork, and I warmed to him at once. I stood up to leave.
‘Don’t go,’ said Holly.
‘But I–’
‘Stay.’
I sat on one side while he looked at Holly’s chart, then took a chair and asked her question after question, which for the most part Holly answered briefly, in a soft, subdued voice. Why had she come off her drugs? How long had she planned it? What exactly had made her decide she could no longer bear to go on living? What had been the trigger? Was this the first time that she had tried or considered trying? What about the cuts along her arms? How would she describe her mood at the time leading up to the suicide attempt? He told her to give her mood a colour and Holly thought and then she said, ‘Maroon.’ How many pills had she taken? Had she discovered as she swallowed them that she wanted to live? How would she describe her feelings now? He asked her to give her present mood a number, on a scale of one to ten, one being the lowest and ten the highest. Holly glared at him with a hint of her old self in the glint of her eyes, and said three and two-fifths and Dr Thorne smiled at her as if he really liked her. The questions went on and on. He looked at her tongue and took her pulse. He asked her if she had heard voices or seen strange things. Holly’s eyes slid towards me as if she was suddenly terrified and asking for my help, then away again.
‘Maybe,’ she muttered. ‘How do you know if the voices and the faces are inside your head or outside?’
‘Were you scared?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice had sunk to a whisper. ‘Very. Scared of being mad. When I was dying, I thought…’
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought someone was watching me.’
‘I think that’s quite common.’
‘I saw two shoes…’
So it continued. I felt I shouldn’t be a witness to his precise questions and her murmured answers, and the peeling away of all the layers till we were down to the raw wounds. I sat as quietly as I could, in the sweet stink of lilies.
‘Do you wish you had been successful in your attempt?’ he asked finally.
Once again, Holly looked at me. There was something in her expression I couldn’t read. It was almost sly.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I think I want to be alive.’
28
In spite of everything, I was happy, happier than I’d been for many years. Sometimes I felt guilty about that, but I couldn’t help it. Every day I woke up and saw Todd beside me and my heart would bound with delight in my chest and the day would spread in front of me like a banner. All the things that used to frustrate me at work now seemed easy. The things that used to bore me were filled with interest. I had a new energy and enthusiasm. I was in love.
Sometimes I’d sleep at his place and sometimes he’d sleep at mine. Our flats were like crime scenes in which we had left more and more and more incriminating pieces of evidence betraying our presence: toothbrushes, underwear, cosmetics, shirts, blouses, paperbacks. I was starting to search for things and then realizing they were at Todd’s place. It was fun, never quite being sure where I’d be sleeping at the end of the day. It was a safe adventure.
I knew it would never be quite like this again, whatever happened between us. If it was going to carry on the way I wanted, maybe we would get to a stage where – unimaginably – we would stop thinking about each other all the time, where we would go a day, two, three, without sex, where the other one would be just a familiar part of the furniture. But not now. Now we were endlessly curious about each other. Todd was a maze I wanted to wander in, a puzzle to solve, a magical mystery tour. We talked about our lives, our work, previous lovers, what had gone wrong and what had gone right. We gave each other secrets.
Every day was tantalizingly short because, whatever happened in the future, this intensity and energy would fade. It would have to fade so that we would be able to become normal people again, normal lovers, or partners or, perhaps, just friends, or maybe strangers once more.
But now there was Holly to worry about again. Sitting at breakfast in Todd’s flat – he had prepared fruit and coffee and some special kind of muesli – I said that I’d be late seeing him in the evening because I’d have to stop in and see Holly. He just nodded.
‘This is all going to take up a lot of time,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
‘I’d understand if you resented it.’
‘I don’t resent it.’
‘I know that when you met Holly it wasn’t a complete success…’
‘You mean I wasn’t a complete success?’
‘It wasn’t your fault. To put it mildly.’
‘For someone who’s meant to be her best friend, don’t you think you’re a bit scared of her?’
I needed a moment to think about that one. ‘Holly’s always been high maintenance,’ I said. ‘Emotionally
, I mean. She’s been worth it, though. She’s driven me mad, she’s embarrassed me like you couldn’t imagine…’
‘Oh, but I can,’ said Todd.
‘But I wouldn’t have done half the things I’ve done without her. That’s what she does. She spurs you into things that seem insane and then you think, Well, why not? Lately it went wrong and it was just the insane bit. That’s not the real her you’ve seen.’
‘You don’t need to convince me.’
I put my hand across and stroked his silky brown hair. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘You more than anyone. As well as destroying herself, Holly put a lot of effort into driving me away as well. Maybe that was another way of harming herself, by getting rid of the people who love her.’
I stood up, pulled Todd to his feet and folded my arms round the soft wool of his suit. ‘I want you to do me a favour,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
‘Most people would say, “What?” first.’
‘Not me, not for you.’
‘Oh.’ I blinked at him and almost couldn’t think what I had been going to say. ‘I want you to like Holly now, for my sake. Later, maybe, you’ll like her anyway.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘And I’ll come round later this evening.’
‘That’s part of the deal.’
∗
I sat by Holly’s bedside for almost an hour without speaking. Her eyes would flicker open for a few seconds and then she would sleep again. I was almost asleep myself, so that when she spoke I started. I couldn’t make out what she said at first. It was just a mumble.
‘What?’
‘I’m scared.’
‘What of? Or do you mean just scared?’
‘Of going back.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Leaving here. Going back to the world. I’m safe here.’
‘Stuart’s out on bail now. Charlie told me. But I don’t think he’ll be after you again.’
‘I’m not worried about him. I even keep thinking I shouldn’t press charges…’
‘You should. You must. He could have killed you.’
‘He was just the one who got to me first, wasn’t he?’